As do pricier engagement rings.
In short, if you blow more than $20,000 on a wedding, your chances for divorce go up 350%.
Still trying to find a study that shows the correlation coefficient (not to mention a study about the rate of divorce amongst women who insist on hyphenating their names, though I've heard studies have been squashed on that topic).
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Obviously, if she wants a wedding that is that expensive, she's high maintenance and thus more likely to frivorce when things get boring or she gets unhappy.
Interesting. I would have thought that higher-priced weddings would correlate with lower divorce rates. We know that divorce rates are lower for higher-income and more educated couples. If you assume that expensive weddings happen more often among higher-income couples, you would expect lower divorce rates.
But you know what they say about the word "assume." Perhaps high-priced weddings are the purview only of higher income, better-educated couples. Actually, I'd love to see the divorce rate for lower-income, lower-educated couples that had an expensive wedding. I be that it's sky high.
Good litmus test: Watch Braveheart with a prospective wife. When the wedding scene comes up, ask her what she thinks of it.
Correct Answer: Oh, it's so romantic and intimate! Just the two of them and a priest! We should do that, too!
Wrong answer: How can they get married in the woods like that? It's so dirty and filthy and ugly....wait, it's over? That was way too short! And where was everybody else? Didn't the parents show up? What about the flowers, the cake, and the bride's maid? Where did people register back in those days? Didn't they have photographers? How was anyone to know they were married? And that priest looked really creepy to me....
The "insisting on the hyphenated name" trick - is a DEAD giveaway.
At that point, RUN! Run as if your ass were on fire!
"if you blow more than $20,000 on a wedding ring"
<---if that's greater than a rounding error in your net worth, it is indicative of insanity which highly correlates to divorce.
I think its more a function of the man thinking "money" will buy him intimacy. Or more simply the foolish idea as Rollo describes it of relationship equity, the more I give her the more she will be loyal to me.
And the reality is you cannot buy a woman's loyalty and nothing in the past matters to a woman in the moment, it is only what they feel in the present and to a lesser extent the future that matters to them.
Secondarily, its bad at expectation control. You have a small simple wedding and take her to a nearby hotel or a camping trip her expectations for the future of the relationship is going to be much less that if you do the huge vacation to Fiji, cayman islands ...
I've even heard a woman's parents mouth complaints about the life their daughter is living after the guy "took her all over the world" on their honeymoon and then returned to the simple life he had.
And finally there's also a function of the meaninglessness of the ritual today. Its kind of like a Hollywood movie. There are old movies with cheaper sets and bad special effects that are still compelling because of the substance of the movie (Story, characters) and there are plenty of more modern movies that have wonderful special effects, beautiful scenes and yet the story and characters are so empty that they are quickly forgotten.
Hollywood compensates for the lack of substance with bigger booms. Marriage compensates for a lack of substance by adding more expensive trappings. Bigger rings, bigger cakes, fancier dresses, bigger honeymoons.
But under it all is fear and desperation.
Seems pretty intuitive. If both bride and groom are willing to sink that kind of money into a wedding rather than a mortgage or family trust or some kind of long term investment - or just not going $20,000 into debt - then that's prima facie evidence their priorities are messed up.
Expensive wedding indicates the frivolous use of other people's money. Likely from "daddy". A sensible girl would want that money to invest in her new home, where she will be living and durable goods to get her new life off to a good start. Maybe even some sort of financial investment that she and her new husband can enjoy the fruits of together.
The wedding is purely for the enjoyment of the bride. The groom gets nothing out of it.
Perhaps a huge wedding is an overcompensation for what the couple AREN'T feeling. The trappings are there but the love isn't. However, a wedding is a nice time for a couple to come out of the shadows and declare their love for one another before the community, to celebrate it without shame. Many relationships that are based primarily on sex do not want to see the light of day. They want the secrecy. A deep enduring relationship is an accomplishment that people grow into. The Olympics celebrate the accomplishments of great athletes. A wedding is the accomplishment of making the grown up decision to select one person for your whole life.
This just in: higher marriage rates correlate with higher divorce rape rates. At some point natural selection is going to win.
My wife and I had a very inexpensive wedding but still managed to accommodate 150 people. The whole thing probably cost less than $2,000. Her parents have six kids and we probably had the most expensive wedding (save one brother of hers who married into money). My wife has never expected large amounts of money to be spent on such things. We went on a nice week-long camping trip after that. It was cheap, fun, and secluded. My sister-in-law was married by a judge with only about ten people there. She and her husband came out just as married as my wife and I - and just as married as anyone who spent $20,000+ for the privilege.
Expensive weddings are for two things, and two things only:
1. for the bride to have "her day" that she's been dreaming about for her whole life
2. for the bride's (or groom's) family to show off how much money they have
Reason 1 probably means run away. Reason 2 means your bride may have been taught poor financial management, a problem that can be corrected.
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/i-cant-make-this-shit-up/
Wow, what a great correlation. A friend of mine had two sons. One had a more or less middle class wedding. (I don't know the numbers) The other married the daughter of a Russian immigrant who had done well in the US and he spent $100,000 on the wedding. The $100k couple divorced within a year.
Oh and funniest video ever:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gimiDBAK2wA
Great post Cappy. Keep em coming
Oh and my blog site if anyone wants to visit.
https://wisdomdistillery.wordpress.com/
Our wedding cost about $25K including honeymoon. All parties involved, bride, groom, and respective parents of the bride & groom all kicked in cash for the proceedings (it was split roughly around 1/3 for each). It was a fun time for everyone. I still get complimented this day for having a great wedding/party by my friends and family who attended. Outside our mortgage, we have very little debt (a car loan that will be paid off in a year or less). Debt is a four letter word in my vocabulary, to be avoided.
I have friends who had blowout weddings, we are talking in the $50K range for a wedding (and this was 20 years ago), who are now divorced. Likewise with friends who were married by a judge, who are now divorced. Know your spouse.
A great post Cappy, and one that I would humbly recommend you re-post from time-to-time just to keep these precepts fresh in your reader’s minds. As for me, it was good to read this today as I had a rough week with some very demanding clients that almost had me pining for the days as a corporate drone….however, your post knocked me back to reality.
I left the corporate world in 2010 to form my own consulting business and frankly have enjoyed the freedom and control over my destiny ever since. The straw that broke it for me was the inane training requirements most Fortune 500 companies make you take under penalty of termination. Here in California all corporations over a certain size are mandated to give hours-long sexual harassment training to all employees that was mandated by Governor Schwarzenegger as “payback” to the feminist for their support of him during his run for governor. The training is insulting, demeaning, and pretty much assumes all males are closet rapists who can barely be trusted to walk free in society. In addition to this non-sense, I worked in the energy industry and we also had to do a number of annual online classes as payback for the Enron scandal. Never mind that the vast majority of the employees were not working as energy traders or anything even close to it----the (Federal) law was the law. So we had to commit to short-term memory all kinds of ridiculous rules, regs, and energy trading terminology in order to pass the necessary tests every year that reminded us not to do as Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling had done. And if this training was not completed by the time Christmas vacation season rolled around, guess what you were going to be doing on Christmas eve?
Anyway, thanks for a great post and the smack upside the ol’ noggin…all the best. T.
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